Why didn't it include Hobgoblin Archers and Swordsman? There are the rarer units. Did we really need all of the Goblin Swordsman?

Likewise, when (if?) the Dwarven set is released, I would like to more Heavy Swordsman and Crossbowman.

I too wish there were more archers and red swordsmen. But then again, I wish Amazon would get the game so they can ship it to me. No more pre-orders from me!

biomage said:

Maybe the Goblin army doesn't have so many archers and red swordsmen. If every army got the same amount of unit type then they wouldn't be so different. I like that armies are asymmetrical.

I wouldn't like it if buying the HH expansion meant that the Goblins got a ton of Red elite units. I imagine them as a ragtag army that relies on numbers and not quality.

The same goes for the Dwarves. If the Dwarves are not meant to have lots of Crossbows then so be it.

FragMaster said:

This may be so. However, if more of these units were provided, I would think it would be easier to field and entire army of goblins using existing deployment cards. Also, I don't want to have to buy another base game for these 16 pieces.

biomage said:

BattleLore is a boardgame and has inherent balance. Balance that maybe will be disrupted by releasing without any thought lots of units. Maybe Goblins are not supposed to have that many good {red} units. It's what they do. If BattleLore was a collectable game or like that then maybe it would have that marketing format that you mentioned above. {and probably I wouldn't buy it if that was the case}.

I really like the differences between the armies and the fact that they are balanced. If BattleLore was released in a collectible format with army "booster" packs and uncontrolled army expansions, I wouldn't bother at all with it. I already am dissapointed with Days of Wonder expansion policies. I hope that FFG will stop making small box expansions and start producing big box expansions with lots of content. I want to see even more differences between armies mechanics-wise and some units that don't fit in an army {in our case, elite Goblins} should be kept at a minimum.

This is not a collectible game.

FragMaster said:

Couldn't agree more with these two (well, three I suppose ) statements.

I am still trying to figure out if Goblin Call to Arms (henceforth dubbed GCtA) doesn't disrupt the balance of BattleLore. Using it to go "full-Goblin" (bad Robert Downey, Jr. in Tropic Thunder voice: You never go full-Goblin!!) by choosing two of the three 4-card decks (early polls show A & B as the way to go), has so far yielded each time with four armies, quite a substantial force that looks red heavy in melee foot units (six ogre units once!), blue heavy in the calvary (almost always between 3 and 5 hyena riders) with nice ranged back up from either slingers or ostich riders, and usually both. Double Bands is the "Mounted Knights" specialist version, and, yikes, that is one tough force. I am guessing that the Dwarves and Human CtA (DCtA and HCtA respectively ) will match the strength, but remains to be seen.

FragMaster said:BattleLore is a boardgame and has inherent balance. Balance that maybe will be disrupted by releasing without any thought lots of units. Maybe Goblins are not supposed to have that many good {red} units. It's what they do. If BattleLore was a collectable game or like that then maybe it would have that marketing format that you mentioned above. {and probably I wouldn't buy it if that was the case}.

I agree that BL isn't and shouldn't be a collectible game. However, the game itself doesn't have inherent balance. It is the scenarios that make it balanced. Since you don't know what units your opponent will field, Call to Arms deployment and specialist recruitment isn't balanced. That's okay with me. If I want balance, I'll choose one of the scenarios. A lot of thought goes into making the scenarios balanced. With Call to Arms and specialists, I like the ability to customize the armies and the challenge of knowing what I will be facing. I like that Call to Arms is only allows customization without being a point buy system. In this case, customizable doesn't equal collectible.

biomage said:

Again, I disagree, sorry.

If a player chooses better Specialist cards than his opponent then he TILTED the balance in his favor. The GAME balance comes from allowing only two Specialist cards to be chosen maximum. It's a whole different thing. Don't confuse game balance with a player's choice that give him the upper hand. After all that is what it is all about anyway, isn't it? Making better choices than your opponent?

Another factor that I REALLY like in BL is the balance of the Specialist cards. Some add units, some others replace units. Some add 1 unit, some add 2 units. This all has to do with game balance firstly and it is apparent that the designer tried to make all cards equally attractive for players to choose and bothered with customisation 2nd, or created balanced customisation options if you will.

If there were cards that added elite Goblins for example then I could accept it but elite Goblins are not a common unit for Goblins to have and they are not Specialists. So no reason to have them.

Customization as free as you describe it will surely mean an unbalanced game and mirror armies. For me anything that differentiates the armies more is a good thing. One of these things is unit availability for each of the armies. Goblins are NOT a well-trained army in the game's universe so elite Goblins should be rare or almost non-existant.

Moreover, adding customisation options to players without first checking the balance will push players into buying the elite units for every army that they can get their hands on. This is not collectible game but it sure looks like it.

Bottomline, giving plentiful numbers of every unit type to each army is BAD, really bad for the game IMHO. I'd stay far away from it if that was the case.

If you don't like the phrase BL is not a collectible game let me say it differently:

BattleLore is not Heroscape.

FragMaster said:

You have obviously put more thought in this than I have and you make a convincing argument.

Just to re-iterate (and likely unnecessarily so ) what FragMaster posted, Original Call to Arms is rife with balance. It isn't the balance that most people were expecting though, and that caused some dissatisfaction when it was first released. (I am not sure that that initial dissatisfaction's prejudice has completely worn off...) The balance is through the limits imposed by the deployment arrangements upon each card (as opposed to a points system), and then one's ability to organize the semi-random draw into a more cohesive army than the opponent.

I won't go into the variety of ways this plays out, here in this post, but FragMaster addressed several of them, and as Biomage hinted, yes, putting thought into it is rewarded.

Okay, I finally received my copy from Amazon (pre-order), and one thing I must say is: I am very disappointed that the Goblin Specific deployment cards contain NO green short swords, NO single archer, and NO red short sword. In other words, with the new goblin specific decks, you cannot field three unit types from the base set.

oshfarms said:

I think the way FFG intends the GCtA to work is to combine the 4 cards for each of the A, B, and C decks with the three (or four in the case of one of them?) cards from the original CtA decks that have goblin units upon them. It would be cool to get some direction from FFG on this, but I am not certain that a great deal of thought was put into it (would love to be wrong about this).

Yes, the more I am delving into the FFG expansions, and the more I am reading about HH, the more I am wondering about how much care and thought was put into them.

I love Battlelore, but the way I see FFG moving on this I wonder whether Magestorm might not be an option instead...

Cheers,

Giles.